Article excerpt

GLANCING out the window of his office here at Duke University,
C. Eric Lincoln leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath
before responding to a hovering question: Why are black youths at
risk?

"The reasons are many," says the professor of religion and
culture, one of the premier scholars of the black experience in
America. "We can begin by noting the high risk that black youth run
of unemployment," 50 to 60 percent nationwide, he says: "This, in
turn, has its own accompanying fallout of problems."

In the course of an hour, he takes this reporter on a mind
journey through a weave of economic, social, political, and
historical threads of the African-American experience, a subject he
knows through and through. To describe his lengthy resume as
impressive would be an understatement - honorary degrees, awards,
articles, lectures, speeches. Dr. Lincoln has authored numerous
books, including a collection of his poems and a novel. He has
written on civil rights, religion, the arts. His most recent work,
"The Black Church in the African American Experience" (Duke
University Press), co-authored by Lawrence H. Mamiya, is an
in-depth statistical survey and analysis of the black church in
America.

"You don't often hear of C. Eric, the man; you hear about C.
Eric, the myth," says Dr. Alton Pollard, assistant professor of
religion at Wake Forest University. He studied under Lincoln. "It's
when you come in contact with the man that you know he's really
human, fully human, and his human-ness spills into the lives of
others."

THE plight of black youth, primarily black males, has become a
high-concentration concern for Lincoln, a United Methodist
minister. It is a subject that weighs heavily on his work and
outlook of the present and the future of the black community in the
United States.

Black youth are an "endangered species," he says, noting that
although that phrase has become trite, the statistics support it.
Those statistics are accelerating in a very negative way, he says.
"Black youth are not only an endangered species but, statistically
speaking, the whole successor generation is at risk."

Sorting out some hows and whys from a whirlwind of causes and
effects, Lincoln speaks in a commanding, speechlike manner:

"We live in a society where success, self-fulfillment are
largely measured in terms of levels of consumption, where the
successful person - which may be read as the 'valued' person - is
the one who has been able to amass all those little indices of
success ... clothes, cars, houses, jewelry, liquor, whatever."

But when a whole community is, in Lincoln's view, "locked out of
the socially approved process" for acquiring status and
appreciation in society, members of that community develop
alternative means toward the same end.

The problem begins early with alienation, Lincoln says, and
because of this alienation, the black youth finds himself as a
member of a counter culture.

"Because of the fact that blacks are so often excluded from ...
the race for success, self-validation, self-fulfillment, they find
themselves developing alternative routes and this, in turn, leads
to criminalization," Lincoln says.

He continues: "So then we come up with some horror statistics,
one being that at least a quarter of all black male youth will be
criminalized before they reach 30. This means, in effect, that we
may as well wipe out a quarter of the black male population for all
intents and purposes, because once you are criminalized by the
system it is very, very, very difficult to be forgiven or to be
rehabilitated and to be readmitted. I shouldn't have said
'readmitted, he corrects himself, "because they were never admitted
in the first place. …